Purpura’s new collection of poems, It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful (Penguin/Viking) was published in October 2015. She is the author of three previous collections of poems (King Baby, Stone Sky Lifting, The Brighter the Veil); three collections of essays (Rough Likeness, On Looking, Increase), and one collection of translations (Poems of Grzegorz Musial: Berliner Tagebuch and Taste of Ash).

A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award (for On Looking), she has also been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, a Fulbright Foundation Fellowship (Translation, Warsaw, Poland), three Pushcart Prizes, a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, and multiple residencies and fellowships at the MacDowell Colony.

Purpura’s poems and essays appear in: Agni Magazine, Ecotone, Field, The Georgia Review, Orion, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review and many other magazines and anthologies, including Best American Essays 2011 and The Pushcart Anthology.

Purpura is Writer-in-Residence at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, MD, and she teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop in Tacoma, WA.